Medium, for those who don’t know, is site for authors to publish their writings, attract readers and, if successful, receive payment. I had a number of articles on Medium which I’ve now moved to this site. I had received some quite large sums of money and had attracted thousands readers and followers. Then, I received an email that my site had been banned.
The email is here:
Hello,
We are writing to notify you that your Medium.com account is in violation of our rules, and your profile and posts will no longer be publicly available on Medium.
Due to the elevated risk of potential harm to persons or public health, Medium’s Trust & Safety team has removed your account under its rules (https://medium.com/policy/medium-rules-30e5502c4eb4).
More info: https://help.medium.com/hc/en-us/articles/360045484653
Your work will remain accessible to you while signed in, and may be exported at any time by following the instructions here, but will appear as unavailable to others.
This goes against any notion of a free exchange of ideas and is part of what is called ‘cancel culture’. My writings don’t follow accepted ideas. Instead of allowing these ideas to be discussed in an intelligent way, writers (or speakers) that go against the established view are simply cancelled, that is taken offline or prevented from speaking.
When Medium started it was for people to share opinions. I suspect that the people who drafted the original rules would be horrified at suppressing the ideas that are banned now. The updated rules are here.
It’s one thing for an organisation to push this but it’s another for individuals to actually carry it out. I would have thought that the kind of people who work for Medium would have an interest in journalism and conveying ideas. How do they feel about suppressing ideas that don’t conform to a an established view?
When I read posts (for instance on Reddit) from people who subscribe to the orthodox view of Covid and who criticise the ‘ignorant’ people who don’t, I’m struck by the cliched view that they assume people such as I hold. We are, so they assume, stupid, ignorant and gullible. But the reality is that they are unable to see any views other than those that they agree with because they are suppressed on all media. They are like racist white people who assume that all black people are stupid because they have had no contact with them.
It seems I violated the rules of Covid at least but all the rules are subject to interpretation. I have also found that other articles that don’t accept the established view of trans pronouns have been banned on Medium.
By Philip Braham on May 19, 2021.